Medieval Essays

by Étienne Gilson, James G. Colbert (Translator)

This book is a collection of nine articles by the twentieth century's leading medievalist, Etienne Gilson. A major participant in the revival of Thomistic philosophy, Gilson was a member of the French Academy and, after a university career culminating at the Sorbonne and the College de France, he turned down an invitation from Harvard University to become the guiding spirit of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto for several decades. Several of the articles stand on their own as making a significant contribution to topics like St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. Likewise, "The Middle Ages and Naturalism" contrasts Renaissance Humanists and Reformers with the medievals on the defining issue of their attitude toward nature in order to understand who actually stands closer to the ancient Greeks. All of the articles give an insight into the great synthetic visions articulated by the better-known works of Gilson like The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. We see Gilson's meticulous spadework for the broader theme of Christian philosophy in his examination of the Latin Averroist Boethius of Dacia's book on the eternity of the world. Gilson finds that Boethius never expresses the view attributed to Latin Averroism that there are contradictory truths in religion and philosophy, although he does think that Boethius is unsuccessful in his account of the relations between philosophy and theology. The opening piece revisits a battle now won (and won in great measure by Gilson's efforts), namely the fight to acknowledge the very existence of medieval philosophy and win its place in the academic world. But the article also makes the effort--which becomes a connecting thread throughout the nine articles-to pinpoint the uniqueness of what Gilson calls Christian philosophy. The closing article studies the profound influence of the great Muslim thinker Avicenna on Latin Europe drawing a parallel between Avicenna's work and that of the great Christian medievals like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. When Gilson died in 1978, a great deal of his work on the history of philosophy, and specifically God, the primacy of existence or esse over essence, and the impact of Christianity on philosophy had been translated. A significant amount of material, however, has not yet appeared in English. The publication of Medieval Studies represents a vital step in bringing these important works into the English-speaking world.

Genres: Philosophy, Medieval

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Étienne Henri Gilson was born into a Roman Catholic family in Paris on 13 June 1884. He was educated at a number of Roman Catholic schools in Paris before attending lycée Henri IV in 1902, where he studied philosophy. Two years later he enrolled at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1907 after having studied under many fine scholars, including Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim.
Gilson taught in a number of high schools after his graduation and worked on a doctoral thesis on Descartes, which he successfully completed (Sorbonne) in 1913. On the strength of advice from his teacher, Lévy Bruhl, he began to study medieval philosophy in great depth, coming to see Descartes as having strong connections with medieval philosophy, although often finding more merit in the medieval works he saw as connected than in Descartes himself. He was later to be highly esteemed for his work in medieval philosophy and has been described as something of a saviour to the field.
From 1913 to 1914 Gilson taught at the University of Lille. His academic career was postponed during the First World War while he took up military service. During his time in the army he served as second lieutenant in a machine-gun regiment and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery upon relief from his duties. After the war, he returned to academic life at Lille and (also) Strasbourg, and in 1921 he took up an appointment at the Sorbonne teaching the history of medieval philosophy. He remained at the Sorbonne for eleven years prior to becoming Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the College de France in 1932. During his Sorbonne years and throughout his continuing career Gilson had the opportunity to travel extensively to North America, where he became highly influential as a historian and medievalist, demonstrating a number of previously undetermined important differences among the period’s greatest figures.

Gilson’s Gifford Lectures, delivered at Aberdeen in 1931 and 1932, titled ‘The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy’, were published in his native language (L’espirit de la philosophie medieval, 1932) before being translated into English in 1936. Gilson believed that a defining feature of medieval philosophy was that it operated within a framework endorsing a conviction to the existence of God, with a complete acceptance that Christian revelation enabled the refinement of meticulous reason. In this regard he described medieval philosophy as particularly ‘Christian’ philosophy.

Gilson married in 1908 and the union produced three children, two daughters and one son. Sadly, his wife died of leukaemia in late 1949. In 1951 he relinquished his chair at the College de France in order to attend to responsibilities he had at the Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, Canada, an institute he had been invited to establish in 1929. Gilson died 19 September 1978 at the age of ninety-four.

Reviews

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilson was the dean of French medievalists through much of the 20th Century. This volume is a compilation of essays appearing in various journals between 1940 and 1970. It is not easy reading. It is written for experts in Scholasticism and it simply assumes a knowledge of Latin and the currents of philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages. But it is worth the trouble. One can see the flowering of medieval thought as though through a microscope.